Sorry I haven’t written lately. but I have been trying to keep this farm going in perhaps the worst summer heat I have ever seen in my 60-plus years.  Luckily, up in our mountain valley, we have been getting just enough rain, but down on the flat lands, it is looking real brown.  We had soaker hoses out for the late-June, early July dry spell, but we rolled them up for mowing - perhaps we’ll roll them out again.

We can’t gripe, though, about the berry picking and potato digging.  We have seen picking berries since early June, and quality and sales have been good.  And I am impressed with our early potato digging = the early Norlands gave us a 10X ‘payback’.  One casualty of this heat is the Ginger Gold apples.  we used to get nice crops, but this year the heat, sunburn, and, ants, birds, and Japanese Beetles stripped them.  Oh, well, they will make perfectly good fire wood!  We will be replanting new, and old, resistant varieties, that mature later in the season.

The one ‘fly in the ointment’ is the bogus land re-assessment that our county was sued into, and they sub-contracted to the worst corporation that I have ever seen.  We have a ‘hoop house’ which is a non-permanent agricultural structure.  The kit cost us $1300 to put up, and the damn fools assessed it at $10,300.  We, we got some good ( ie. free) legal advice, and appealed, and got the assessment down to just over what we paid for it.

I really feel that  hoop houses should be judged a ‘farm equipment’, same as a roto-tiller, and not be assess-able.  I realize that to do this we need action at the Pa. Govt. level, and they are currently dysfunctional.

So, all I can say, is we need to for the “Hoop House Liberation Front”, and teach these dang bureaucrats that we can grow their food, fresh and local, to give them food security, but only if the give us full Right to Farm, and not look upon us a cash cows.  Like our first book is titled, we ain’t ‘getting rich’, but we are “Gettin’ By‘.  So, for all of you who small farm, and for all of you who eat food from small local farms, be aware and alert to you local taxing authorities.  I’m sure they would like your opinions.

thom marti

I have been distracted from my genealogical studies, trying to deal with this awful hot and dry summer on our farm.  But I have been taking a daily heat break, and searching old newspapers in Fayette Co., Pa., and I am collaborating with several Johnson family collaborators.  Some of this information confirms the Johnson’s ties to the 1790’s Quaker migration from Chester Co., Pa., to Menallen Township.

Since the purpose of my studies has been to write our family veteran’s history, I have been gifted with this story of the bad years of 1943-1945.  In the early years of WW2, our nation was heavily dependent on coal for energy.  German submarines prowled the Caribbean, and the US East Coast. torpedoing oil tankers right off our shores.  The Selective Service determined that coal miners were essential to the war effort, and exempted them from the draft.

My grandfather McClelland Johnson’ s brother,Grover Cleveland Johnson and his elder son  Edward stayed on in the mines; while Edward’s younger brother, Grover Cleveland Johnson Jr. went off to the Army, and was deployed to North Africa.  He was aboard the British troop transport the Rhona, which was carrying two thousand troops and crew from Algeria east to join the attack on Field Marshall Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

Unknown to the Allies, German bombers were now carrying a powered and remote controlled prototype anti-ship missile.  One of these sunk the Rhona, taking my cousin G.C.  Jr. down with 1300 others.  The Allies were so stunned they covered up this loss, and news of the Luftwaffe’s secret weapon, for years.

Within two years of that naval disaster,  Grover C. Sr., , and his oldest son, Edward, were working in the Crucible mine, in Greene Co., Pa.  They were timbermen -  mine carpenters installing braces to hold up  slate.  Slate is a dangerous slippery rock, and it caved in, killing my grand-uncle and his son, and several others.

Now, even 65 years later, their tragic deaths  chill me.  I have only been in a deep mine once, as a geology student, and I could not wait to get back to sunlight and open skies.

I write this tribute to these three brave men who died for our country, one out on the sea, and two deep in the earth.   They join a WW2 Army Private Earl Wakefield, and a Vietnam War  Army Private, Craig Marrata, as  KIAs in our families’ honor role; several others suffered wounds, both physical and mental.  My own father Art Dunn’s life was cut short, from his exposure to  battlefield disease in WW2.

Thom Dunn Marti

PS:  I met my cousin Diane yesterday for the first time.  Grover Sr. was her grandfather.  Diane showed me family pictures.  I spent a long time looking at 0ne of young Edward, smashed underneath a Pennsylvania hill.  In a happier and safer world, he would have been an older second cousin that I could have met.

Since I last wrote I have spent a few ‘too hot’ afternoons sitting at this desk surrounded by piles of pedigrees, family trees, family group sheets, and US Census reports back two centuries.  It was a struggle, but I really do feel that I have put the story together.  I now believe, with a fair bit of evidence, that a group of English Quakers, many from Birmingham and Wiltshire, immigrated to William Penn’s “Penns Woods”, which he was given as a grant for helping financially save the English government.  Many of these English Quakers settled in Chester, and Delaware Counties, Pa., and some of them moved south into the lands around Chesapeake Bay.

Since I last wrote, I have learned that by the mid-18th century, a number of these tidewater Quakers migrated to Western Virginia.  At that time Virginia was claiming what are now the 5 SW counties of Pa.   All of Washington, Greene, Allegheny, Fayette, and part of Beaver Co. (I lived my first 4 years in this part = and I never learned in school that Va. once claimed the land my parent’s home stood on in Hopewell Township).

These early Maryland, and  Virginian, Quakers set down some roots in what the Virginians were then claiming as Yohagania, Monogania, and Ohio Counties (named after the three major rivers.), arriving after the French and Indian (or Seven Years) War.  They began to farm, but were quite isolated, especially when the Revolutionary War broke out. In 1783 the Pennsylvania claim to its SW corner was accepted, and Fayette Co., and its included Menallen Twp. were formed.   Franklin Ellis provides a good description of these early Quakers in his History of Fayette Co., Pa. Word of their success must have gotten back to Philadelphia., and soon Pa. Quakers began to plan their move to their existing colony out west.

I found the naming of this Quaker township quite interesting.  As I mentioned in my last posting, I also live in a “Menallen” Township, in Adams County, Pa., one hundred and fifty miles (and two mountain ranges) east of the Fayette Co. Quakers.  We also have a “Menallen” Quaker Meeting, that is still vibrant, two and a half centuries after its founding.

I went to meeting there on Sunday (though the Society of Friend’s has a completely different system for naming days and months; they consider our modern system, which is largely derived from the names of pagan gods, to be suspect).  Over the last three decades we have occasionally joined the Quakers in their wonderful silent worship.

Before the meeting I spoke with a descendant of one of the founding families of the meeting, and one of the current meeting’s historians.  He, like most of the meeting, had not heard much about the Fayette Co. Quakers, who shared their name.   I did learn that the Adams Co. meeting was formed by mostly Irish Quakers.

I read in the history of the three meetings first formed in then western York County, that Menallen was a word of Irish origin, spelled in all possible ways in old records.  I then found The Immigration 0f Irish Quakers to Pa., 1682- 1750. , by A.C. Myers, had found “Monalin Co, later Minallen” as possible origins of Menallen.  A quick Google search taught me that the village of Monalin , in county Wicklow, is on Ire land’s east coast,  in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains.

Sometimes new  bits of knowledge can lead to some changes in one’s hypotheses.  I had thought that the late 1790’s wagon trains that took Chester Co., Pa.  Quakers westward to Menallen Twp., Fayette Co., might have passed by our local Menallen meeting (which was located on the road they would have taken - current Pa. Rt. 234), been hosted by them, and taken their name westward, to name their new colony.   But then I thought “whoops”, Menallen Twp. , Fayette Co. was already named and formed in 1783, by those 1760’s Md. and Va.  Quaker immigrants, before my Pa. Quaker connection families headed west near the turn of the 19th century.

I cannot yet say for sure how the name Menallen got to two geographically separate distant counties in Pennsylvania, but I think both waves of these Irish immigrant Quakers had their roots in Monalin, Ireland.  I welcome any additional input from anyone who reads this.

Lost in time,

Thom Dunn Marti

My last post was about how I was learning about how my Fayette County, Pa.  Johns(t)on, Kelley, Simpson, and Ghrist families were tied into the Quaker Jeffries family who had been evicted from England for their beliefs, and ended up in Chester County, Penn’s Woods.

As I looked at the various family trees I spotted an Ann Woodward, who had married Wm. Jeffries near the beginning of the 19th Century.  Soon afterwards, the Woodwards, Jeffries, Essingtons,Chandlers, etc., after the Ohio War with the Native Americans had died down, loaded up their wagons and left SE Pennsylvania, to make the arduous trek nearly 300 miles westward.

I knew from my studies of Quaker history in Fayette County {Franklin Ellis’ History of Fayette Co., 1882 and John Woolf Jordan’s 1912 Genealogical and Personal History of Fayette Co.}, that a lot of  Chester Co. Quakers moved into Fayette Co. in about 1800, prospered, and then in 1850 moved west again.  Some stayed, became Presbyterians, and married into families of local German, Irish, and Scottish farmers

As I thought about this exodus to Menallen Township, Fayette Co.,  I just “Googled-up “John Woodward”, the leader of this exodus.  and, wow, up came an excellent website about “My Quaker Woodward Family Line”.  Linda who put this together sure knows her genealogy!

I traced back through her research regarding Sara Joseph Woodward, Sr. and Sarah Bunker, back through Joseph Jr., and Amy Shotwell;  back to Richard Woodward and Hannah Taylor; to John Woodward and Ann Pyle, to Richard Woodward and Mary Nayle, and finally to Robert Woodward in 1636 (near Birmingham) England.

I am not claiming much of this ‘way back’ research as my own, and I thank JR Kelley and Linda’s “Woodward” for their work.  If I have done anything,  I have connected my Johnson family’s  Redstone Township “patch farm” (which too soon became a mined-out “coal patch”), to their old time links with the Society of Friends.

Oh, by the way, I have attended Quaker meetings, off and on, for the last three decades.  Silence can say a lot!

Thom Dunn Marti

PS:  These early Fayette Quakers named their meeting house, and their township “Menallen”.  I live in another Menallen Township,  Adams County.  We still have the active Quaker Meeting from the 18th Century Penn land grants.  Neither they, nor I, have any inkling as to the connection between these two  Menallens????

Well,

After 3 weeks without rain and 100F temperature (sorry metric fans, I am too heat-blasted to make the conversions), we got a lovely 1.3 inches of rain the other night that filled the rain barrels and soaked the garden.  I am trying not to gripe, because I remember the Four Year Drought of 1999-2003.  Although those were tough years to grow vegetables, our naturally grown orchard produced the best apples and berries  that we have ever grown = the low humidity retarded fungal growth.  and as for the gardens, we have a few tons of rotting hay saved up for mulch.

I just dug fingerling potatoes, and just like my earlier harvest of Norlands, this is being a banner year.  For each unit of potato starts I put in the ground, I have been digging up to  10X as much.  So, we are hanging in there, and keeping up our deliveries to CSA, but the older I get (60 now), the harder this gets.   Any of you younger folks looking for a chestnut log house, and a nice 2.58 Acre (about a Hectacre) micro-farm that has never been sprayed with ag chemicals?

thom marti

I am sitting here, watching the skies try to rain, which would be nice to help break this gathering drought.  I have just spent a few hours trying to figure out the ties between the Jefferies, Ghrists, Simpsons, and Kelleys of  Washington, Fayette, and possibly Westmoreland Counties, all in Pennsylania.  I have reviewed the work of other researchers on ancestry.com, and have also come up with a few leads of my own.  I have decided that much of our work is solid, but that some of it might not be so good.

The first problem is that many of our possible ancestors had extemely common first names, as well as surnames, so there are several possibilities for each person, in the same and multiple municipalities.

The second problem is that the US Census only named the Head of Household until the 1850 enumeration.  In the earlier counts, all other family and non-family members in a household were merely tabulated in a variety of age groupings.  I have tried to do numerical progressions to trace a family aging over the decades, but there really are too many variables to infer facts from such an endeavor.  At best I have found it a somewhat useful method of discarding some of the several persons who share the same name (with more than one spelling), and live in the same, or in neighboring, municipalities,

So I am not able to tell if the Joseph Kelley {Sr.?} in Luzerne township, Fayette Co. in 1820 and 1830, is the same person who resided in Sewickley Twp., Westmoreland Co. in 1840.  I think that there is a good chance the Joseph Kelley in that 1840 census is the same man who lived there in 1850. Among the family members named in that count is one son whose age agrees  with the 1832 birthdate of  Joseph Kelley {Jr.?}who is my great-great grandfather and married Margaret A.Simpson(b.1837)  {also listed as “Martha” in their son Harry’s obituary, as well asin her daughter Margaret Nancy’s (or v.v.) application for marriage, and death certificate}.  They lived in Jefferson Twp., Fayette Co. and sired my great-grandmother Margaret Nancy Kelley (b. 1866), who married George B. Johnson (b.1866).  They lived in Redstone Twp., Fayette Co., and begat my grandfather McClelland Johnson in 1895.

I am also fairly certain that Martha  A. (or J.)  Simpson (b. 1838) was the daughter of James Simpson (b. 1807) and Nancy Anne Ghrist (b. 1810 Jefferson Twp., Pa.   I also have some certainty that Nancy Anne Ghrist (b. 1810) was the daughter of  Joseph Ghrist (b. 1787 in Chester Co. ,Pa.)  and Hannah Anne Jefferies {sp?} (b. ca. 1790 also in Chester).  Other researchers have use LDS records to trace the back to 1611 Wiltshire, England.  I have never researched this data base, but I hear good things about it.

So, as you,my readers can see, this is all rather confusing to me, and probably is to you.   I have found out a lot about my family (remember that I had little knowledge of them until 2007), but the farther back I go, the murkier it gets.   Now that I know of my relatives born in the USA in the late 18th Century, that seems good enough, for now.  I will put my research on pause, for the moment, and start writing up some of what I have found.

I am pleased that some of you , who did not know about this website, have Googled in one of your ancestor’s names, and been lead to our site.  You are more than welcome to use anything you find here, but be warned: 1) I make mistakes, and 2) as you can see I am a terrible typist.  And I welcome members from my “way back” and modern families getting in touch.

Thank You

Thom Dunn Marti

For a couple years I have been posting essays regarding my ‘lost family’.  I guess other folks  are also looking for my people, and they have Googled their ancestor’s  ancestor’s  names, and presto! the pilgrims are transported to this site.  I have located my long lost aunt and cousin this way, and a few other distant cousins (I did not even know they existed) have contacted me about our shared ancestors.  We are all working as a “collaboration of cousins”, to try to regain our familial heritage.

Now I am going to provide the names of my father - Captain Arthur Allen (A.A) Dunn’s weather detachment in NW Europe inWW2.  He left a photo for me of his crew posed in front of a cargo plane ( a C-42 Dakota?), with the number 276 on its nose, and a large “A2″ (or perhaps “H2″)  on the fuselage, under the port side  of its cockpit.

I have figured that this was perhaps in September 1944, when “YI” ( which had been activated in Southern England on D-Day Plus One),  deployed to Northern France.  My father printed his comrade’s names on the back of the photo.

I have had to search it with a magnifying glass = it is tough to make out the exact number of dark brown chevrons and rockers on their olive drab uniforms, so I give you my best guess.  I was able to find a credible  ‘paper trail’ on ancestry.com for 9  of them -marked with (*) of these 20 weather warriors, and I found two that are ‘possibles’ marked with (?), but the other 8 airmen have names which are quite common and I was not able to learn more about them.

I was quite pleased to find so much information, which included some  of their US WW2 Army Record of Enlistments, Social Security Death Indices,  Obituaries, US Veteran’s Gravesites, and the 1930 US Census listing of them as children while they still lived  with their parents.  Of the men I discovered, I fear they have all departed our still war torn world.

So as Jim Lehrer states on The News Hour,  I present them in silence:

Front Row L>R - crouching

CPL Maury Hampton *, CPL Bill Ferebee, Lt Bob Burnight*,  Lt. A.A. Dunn*, CPL Bart Kline, Leo Mitchell.

Second Row L>R -standing

Joe Williams,  SSGT  Ralph Upton*, CPL Tony Myers*, SSGT Renee Duplessis*, SGT Jim O. Hibbets*, 1st SGT Art Brown.

Third Row L>R - standing

Kenny Christianson (?), Sgt John Schobinger*, Murrel Davis*, John Myers, George Rice, John Strong, Jay Zimmet*  (the stripes of the third row’s uniforms are obscured by the men in front of them).

note: Lt. A.A. Dunn and his two non-coms, Ralph Upton and John Shrobinger are given honorable mention in the 21st WX SQDR’s Unit History for being out on patrol along the Cheirs River, near Douzy, France on 8 Oct 1944 when they saw an overloaded ferry capsize in the flooding river.  They dove in and each saved a French child.  For this the Commanding General of the 9th Air Force awarded them with the Soldier’s Medal.  This is the army’s highest award for lifesaving in a non-combat situation.

So, if any of you are magically transported to this site after you typed in your veteran’s name - I look forward to hearing from you.  As a former Coast Guardsman, I really valued the life-saving beacons along our coasts.  I hope that my humble scribblings on our web site can be a beacon for all of us who are adrift in the seas of the past…

Thom Dunn Marti

I just posted a quick Farm Journal report that apologized for my having been away from writing for too long.  Well, I’m back to my research, and back to my writing.  I took a 3 month detour when I decided to work part-time for the US Census.  I needed a change of pace.  I got it!  But I can’t tell you of the adventures, encounters, and frustrations of taking the 2010 Census, at least not for 72 years.

But since I use pre-1940 US Census records as an important tool in my research, I feel that putting in  a total of 1600 miles, and 20 hours/  week in search of America and its residents, gave me a better feel for what past Census takers went thru.  Would I do it again in 2020, when I’m 70?  I have 10 years to think about that…..

But now I am back on Ancestry.com, and finding lots of new information and sharing it with a half dozen “cousin/collaborators”, who also  give me a lot of leads.   I am truly awed by some of the amazing and huge on line files some people have worked out for the Family Tree.

Well, I don’t have the patience to enter all that data onto a computer, so I have a pile of folders and papers that weighs 18 Lbs. (8.2 Kg).  When I started on this 3 years ago, I had perhaps  5% of that, a few papers and photos my mother gave me.  Before I started this project, I had only met 5 of my blood relatives, and heard about another five, before the “Great Dunn Die-Off” stripped me of my heritage and tried to cast me as an adopted “Marti”.  Well, I guess it didn’t take, but I still hang on to the name because it has a certain ring to it.  I’ll be posting some of my new discoveries over the summer.

thom dunn marti

We have been so busy dealing with the grueling winter and damp spring that I have not sat down at this keyboard to write  for too long.  Suffice it to say that Summer Solstice is already behind us, and it is steaming out there!

We just got a brief rain shower that gave us 0.6″ (1.5 cm) of rain, which the berries really needed. All of our berries and currants ripened up at once, so we have been picking a selling a lot of berries.  For those of you who are not yet black currant fans - give them a try.  The folks who believe that these little ribes are the richest source of anti-oxidents.  I like tart tastes, so I grab handfuls as I rush around the farm.

The gardens are growing quite well, too.  Tonight we dig our Norlands for using as “new potatoes”  They are so tender at this stage you can eat one raw, but of course they are better steamed with some butter and salt ( don’t over cook them).

Even the fruit trees are doing rather well.  A lot of folks who want to start backyard orchards are asking us what is a good dwarf cherry to grow.  I have tried to grow sweet cherries and find the fruit gets Brown Rot.  I have grown some Montmorency Cherries, and get a few good harvests, but then the dreaded PTB (Peach Tree Borer) kills them off.  I have had two little North Stars in for 19 years.  They are a cross between Siberian and Morello.  This year our two little trees produced a record 34 quarts betwwen them.

So, I’ll try to write more - it is a good excuse to get out of the heat and humidity.

thom marti

I’m Back!  I took a 3 month Census job for a change of pace  (I had gotten ‘blocked’ in my family research).  I also needed some funds for home and farm repair, and for some possibly more expensive genealogical research.

I got back on Ancestry.com, and found some tantalyzing leads that might pan out showing that William Johnston was the son of Caleb Johnston, who was born before the Revolutionary War, and later lived in Fallowfield (then Pike Run) townships in Washington Co. Pa.

This all takes some oddities in research.  The SW counties of Pennsylvania were once claimed by Virginia until 1781.  at the same time, colonial Pennsylvania had claimed them as part of the then huge Cumberland County.  This means that some of those old records are possibly not in Pa. repositories.

I have just joined the South West Pa. Genealogical Society to see if they can show me how to navigate my time travels through the  mid-18th Century (which is farther back than I have ever researched.  It makes my head hurt.

I am also checking out a Fayette Co., Pa., coal patch town listing that seems to indicate that my Ukrainian great-grandmother (= Mary Vasicko Cumashot’s father Harry Washesky) had tagged along with her family when they left Luzerne Co. in NE PA., and ‘followed the coal’ down into West Virginia, and then back up to SW Pa., before leaving the mines to become steel workers in Beaver Co., Pa.

I have also found some Washesky’s who stayed in Luzerne Co., in the town next to where my grandmother Jewel Cumashot was born.

Sigh, I realize that these leads are (so far) merely implied, but perhaps I’ll hit some good documentation.                                  lost in time…..

thom marti